Marriage Quote by Steve Chabot

“Cornerstone” is doing the heavy lifting here: it’s architectural language that frames heterosexual marriage not as one social arrangement among many, but as load-bearing infrastructure. Steve Chabot’s line isn’t just nostalgia; it’s a bid to make change feel physically risky, like tugging at a foundation stone and inviting collapse. The move is rhetorical triage: shift the debate from rights and harms to stability and continuity, where caution automatically reads as virtue.

The second sentence pivots to process, and that’s where the subtext sharpens. “If we are going to change that” concedes the possibility of change while treating it as presumptively suspect. Then “by the will of the people” invokes democracy as a moral cleanser. In practice, it functions as a delay mechanism and a shield: placing minority civil rights in the hands of majority approval, and recasting opposition as procedural prudence rather than substantive discrimination. It’s a familiar American political maneuver - launder a contested moral position through the language of popular sovereignty.

Context matters: this is the kind of formulation that flourished during the fights over same-sex marriage in the 2000s and early 2010s, when ballot initiatives and constitutional amendments were used to decide who could marry. The line is crafted to sound moderate, even respectful, while quietly endorsing the idea that equal recognition is negotiable. It works because it appeals to two powerful instincts at once: reverence for tradition and trust in “the people,” even when the people have historically been asked to vote on someone else’s dignity.